“Protest and dissent is important,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told the AP. “The problem with this one is it’s not going to change anything.”
I’m presuming when he says “we” he means the royal “we”, ie “I”. I’m not expecting him to negotiate on it. The next CEO will, though, in a couple of months.
“Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‘we.’”
- Mark Twain
Yeah, so which is spez again?
While that quote has been attributed to Twain (and several others) over the years, there is nothing to suggest that Twain used this particular phrasing nor was he the originator of it. That credit goes to George H Derby, under the pseudonym John Phoenix, back in 1855.
The trifecta of “kings, editors and people with tapeworm” has been widely attributed to Mark Twain, but like so many witticisms credited to him, there’s no record he ever said it. It’s also unlikely that Henry David Thoreau ever made the remark once ascribed to him: “We is used by royalty, editors, pregnant women and people who eat worms.”
Worms, or more specifically tapeworms, figure prominently in we-related humor. The earliest known joke to combine parasites and pronouns comes from George Horatio Derby, a humorist from California who assumed the pen name John Phoenix. “I do not think I have a tapeworm,” he wrote in 1855, “therefore I have no claim whatever to call myself ‘we,’ and I shall by no means fall into that editorial absurdity.”
You’re right. Another source is here: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/13/we/
The pigheaded doubling- and tripling-down on this is impressive in a way. Let’s see in a couple of months how many actual content creators left reddit and came here or somewhere else. I do hope spez is left with an empty site full of lurkers and bots, after all people who actually provided content for free for years leave him in the dust…
Then again, I’m not going back there anyway, so to be completely honest I don’t care that much - the fediverse is my new home (even though I’m repulsed by the name).
I can’t go back; they banned my account, after 12 years, and a few hundred thousand karma. I like to think that, in some small way, I helped make reddit a better place than it had been. And now I couldn’t contribute, even if I wanted to.
But really, why would I want to? The point of contributing to a community is to make it better for everyone. Huffman/spez has made it clear that these contributions are not valued, even though they’re the currency that allows them to make money by selling advertisements.
Same. A few years back when there was a big shift to make reddit Social Media™ (which it is not) because that’s what gets money from investors they started clamping down on anything non-circlejerky because they were trying to grow subs and promote it as the Happiest Place On The Intarwebs.
the fediverse is my new home (even though I’m repulsed by the name).
The name doesn’t bother me as much as not reeealy understanding how it all works together. Like, I know kbin and lemmy are different things, so I’m not sure why kbin is all full of Lemmy content.
I’ll have to wait for it to solidify in my brain a little bit more.
you can think of them as different windows into a similar structure. They look different, they’ll assemble the data a bit different, and might even send slightly different forms–but they’re close enough that it’s all legible, all interpretable into their formats.
And kbin and lemmy have very similar formats! But it’s possible for mastodon (the twitter analogue) to interact with kbin and lemmy as well. Even though they present the data in a different way, with different sorting criteria for your feed, and different ideas on how subscribing to a community or a person works, at the end of the day the formats are very similar: a parent post with a bunch of comments.
How is everything he says just such a gigantic PR disaster.
Taking a poll on this one: Spez’s PR people
-
have all been fired in one broad, disastrous sweep like his idol muskrat did
-
are tied up in the closet, ugly crying into their ball gags and slamming their heads against the wall
-
inhabit shallow graves
Someone cleverer than him came up with that “don’t wear Reddit swag for your own safety” comment in the “leaked” memo. They absolutely wanted media coverage of that “internal” comment. Intimating that the protesting users are dangerously crazy without actually saying it is entirely consistent with Spez’s attempt to defame Christian Selig and gaslight us all about it, but too clever to have actually come from Pigboy.
Taking a poll on this one: Spez’s PR people
- have been replaced with a poop emoji
I know nothing about his personality but I guess he is just very simple honest person
Being simple and honest is a virtue if the things you’re saying are principled, being simple and honest when you’re a slimy businessperson with zero sense of moral agency just makes you a fucking leech
But he wasn’t being simple and honest. Simple and honest would have been.
“Regrettably we have decided to remove API access to the vast majority of third party clients, except those designed specifically to provide moderation or accessibility features that the official app currently lacks.
We know this will be very disappointing to many of our users, and a body-blow to developers who have worked hard on their apps.
The truth is that advertising revenue is crucial for our ongoing survival, as is the demographic information that we can gather through our own app.
Application developers should stop taking subscription renewals immediately. We will work with them to help reimburse subscribers for the remainder of existing subscriptions. “
Something along those lines.
Let’s not devalue basic virtues. Honesty is honesty.
Would you rather he flat out lie that “we’ll look into it” or him being honest “I’m not going to do anything about it”. Being honest lets us know where he stands so we can make our plans about migration easier.
I don’t even give a shit about the future of reddit or going back anymore. reddit is dead to me. what I am wishing to see, though, is spez being ousted as ceo and looking even more like a dumb bitch. that will be hilarious news
I don’t even give a shit about the future of reddit or going back anymore.
I’m with you there. For me, the important thing is that you can have great communities online if you keep the noise down. If he wants to take his game home let him, we can play somewhere else. I just hope all the scientists make it, especially Andromeda. So many great discussions, I hope it can continue as we continue to navigate our way out of the mess that is the 2020s.
It’s interesting that this story is being picked up by business news sites now. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but it’s at least catching the business world’s attention.
Yeah, wasn’t part of Reddit’s reasoning for not backing down that the API backlash only affects a small subset of users and that most of their use base won’t notice what’s going on (besides being inconvenienced by the blackout)? This kind of shines a spotlight on the fact that everyone is seeing what’s going on.